Well I'm going the SFF route and I can't wait. But unlike most ppl in this forum, I won't be playing a lick of high graphic games. What I DO want is PVR functionality. That's why I plan on buying a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250 or a 350. So I was looking for something quiet and cool that doesn't need to be too powerful and I came across the SV25. I don't care about the onboard Savage 4 graphics. That's fine with me. What I want to know is if a P3 1.2 (Tualatin) has what it takes for a PVR. I know the Wintv 250 has an encoder but not a decoder like the 350. And I do know that most likely the 133 Mhz bus wont crack under pressure. All I want it a good looking stream of video. So is the bottom system good enough for a PVR?

You want a PVR box? Right now newegg is doing the SS51G box for 179. I am getting one next week for a second cube for me. Couple that with a 2.0G Celeron, OC it to 2.66, add a TV-Wonder or find a AIW 7500 and you are so there. Perfect low-cost PVR goodness. Right now that's cheaper than the SV25

No wonder television's a medium. It's so seldom rare or well done. -Mighty Mouse

HowardDrake wrote:You want a PVR box? Right now newegg is doing the SS51G box for 179. I am getting one next week for a second cube for me. Couple that with a 2.0G Celeron, OC it to 2.66, add a TV-Wonder or find a AIW 7500 and you are so there. Perfect low-cost PVR goodness. Right now that's cheaper than the SV25

Well howard, I did some research on the aiw 7500 and found it is just too unreliable for me to use as a PVR. Seems the aiw cards all seem to be great but the driver support for the software sucks some ass. Looks like I'll go with the ss51g option but I have to find a more reliable tv card setup. Again, I don't care about onboard graphics. I'm not much of a gamer.

I have a Celly 300a and an old pci Rage powered aiw, which I was able to use quite adequately for PVR. Memory was old SIMM's of which I only had 128meg. I can't for the life of me remember what I used for recording software though..........

The Nememiah core EPIA Mini-ITX boards definitely have enough power to run a PVR. I have one right now. I suggested the SS51G because of the very low price at the moment, it's too good to pass up. And you can definitely sink a PVR-250 board quite easily into one of those as well

No wonder television's a medium. It's so seldom rare or well done. -Mighty Mouse

HowardDrake wrote:The Nememiah core EPIA Mini-ITX boards definitely have enough power to run a PVR. I have one right now. I suggested the SS51G because of the very low price at the moment, it's too good to pass up. And you can definitely sink a PVR-250 board quite easily into one of those as well

That's what I'm looking for right there! Thanks for the advice howard. This will help a lot.

The SS51G is a nice box, but do NOT waste your money on a P4-based celeron of any speed. Even a P4 1.6A is faster than any Celeron of any speed on the market right now, because of the difference in cache size and the P4's natural sensitivity to memory bandwidth. Benchmarks of real-world apps show that it takes a 3GHz Celeron to perform as well as a 1.6GHz P4 with 512k cache. With the P4, the cache makes that much difference.

That said, the cheapest genuine Northwood (512k cache) P4 you can get your hands on will be ample to do the job you're looking for. A 1.8A chip should be plenty for your needs, and retails for $129 on NewEgg. If that's too much... consider going for an AMD solution (Nforce2-based SS41G2, if you can find it) instead, since you can get an Athlon XP2500+ for $96, and the Celeron is simply not worth your money.

Edit: To answer your original question, the SV25 with a high-end Tualatin should technically be enough, but you can get a much better box for a little more money, either Athlon or P4-based, these days.

I suggested the Celeron 2.0 as a budget measure, 60 bucks can make a difference to people. But you're right the SK41G wouldn't be too bad either, if you get a XP 1700+ for it for 45 bucks. That would be 218 for the SK and 45 for the XP 1700 vs. 179 for the SS51G and 69 for the Celeron 2.0. 263 vs. 248 only 15 bucks and you do get more bang.

Nice thought

No wonder television's a medium. It's so seldom rare or well done. -Mighty Mouse

Yeah, that I'll concur with. If cheap+fast is your goal, getting the cheapest new Athlon XP you can and the SK41 will get you a solid little XPC that'll outperform the SV25 by a significant margin without spending too much money.

Sorry, but the Celeron is my sworn enemy, and will remain so until they fix the damn thing. En guarde!

Question. How quiet ARE those heatpipe contraptions on the shuttle boxes? Given my last computer sounded like a turbine (glad to have gotten rid of it), I'd like this one to be quiet; quiet enough to leave one at night and still get to sleep. I've read enough reviews though to see that they do quite a nice job with temps. But I would like a real world comment from someone about the noise. Thanks.

So, one other thing. I'd most likely spend just a bit more and go with the P4. I need something relatively cool-running that won't lock up in a hot apartment (no AC) and still be quiet. THAT's why I have a concern with noise and heat.

So I'm going with the SS51G and a 2.4B from newegg. For $174 I can't pass it up. But one question. I'm downloading all the drivers now at work and burning them to cdrw so I have easy access to them while building my machine. BUUUUUT, it looks as if there are different versions of SS51G. There's the regular and then there's SS51G V2.0 that appearently fixes things and addes hyperthreading support. Does anyone know from experience if the SS51G that newegg is selling is the V2.0 one? Thanks.

Ok, nevermind. I'm an idiot and should have looked more closely. Regardless of what version I get, a bios patch ups it to the correct version. And I'm guessing that whatever newegg has in their stock after buring through inventory is probably already loaded with the newest bios version. But I'll get it just in case

Well I got my cube! My SS51G is running like a champ! Wow, I didn't think it would be this cool to switch over to SFF. All my roommates are jeaous now It's the coolest, quietest computer I've had in a long time.

I'm using onboard everything because I'm not a gamer. I'll get around to buying a tv card for it soon and maybe later down the line I'll grab a dvd burner for it to. But for the record I'm definitely a convert. Thanks for all your help here guys.